Design innovative, scalable, and highly available cloud database solutions →mediumMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
PCDE Practice Question: Design innovative, scalable, and highly available cloud database solutions
A financial services firm needs a database for real-time fraud detection that requires single-digit millisecond latency for lookups on a precomputed feature set. The dataset is 5 TB and grows by 1 TB per month. Which database service BEST meets these requirements?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Cloud Bigtable
Bigtable is designed for high-throughput, low-latency access to large datasets. It can handle 5 TB (or more) with SSD nodes. Cloud SQL and Spanner have lower throughput limits. BigQuery is not real-time.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
BigQuery
Why it's wrong here
BigQuery is analytical; latency is seconds, not milliseconds.
- ✓
Cloud Bigtable
Why this is correct
Bigtable provides consistent single-digit ms latency and scales horizontally.
- ✗
Cloud Spanner
Why it's wrong here
Spanner can achieve low latency but is more expensive and complex for simple key-value lookups.
- ✗
Cloud SQL (MySQL)
Why it's wrong here
Not designed for single-digit ms latencies at 5 TB scale.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every PCDE question from scratch — 1,446 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PCDE practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PCDE exam.